I realized the other day that I never wrote about what we used for our Reading program. We've used Rod & Staff the last couple of years. The kids learned to read using Sing, Spell, Read and Write. The main reason I use R&S is because it uses Bible stories as the basis for it's reader. I have a hard time feeding my children pointless stories as part of our homeschool time (although the Sing Spell readers are that way). The kids have started in Genesis and gone all the way through some of the prophets and a bit of Christ's life in the last three years. They hit most all the stories, not just the ones every storybook has. After each story, there is some assortment of comprehension questions, vocabulary, story order, map skills, and other miscellaneous questions.
You definitely wouldn't choose this program because it is jazzy and lots of color. All R&S materials are quite basic, black and white with pretty much no glitz. But, in some ways, that is also why I like it. Sometimes we need to have something in life we do just because it needs to be done.
We also don't complete each lesson in it's entirety. There is way too much book work for the time we have to allocate to Reading. I basically just go through the workbooks and choose out which sections I want the kiddos to complete-always the comprehension ones and another one or two.
The kiddos were both about 1 year in these pictures
